So...I did something bad. In Cygwin I wrote a bash script that took in two directories and copied the contents of one into the other. First, it called "rm -rf" to remove the contents of the second directory. I accidentally ran the script with no second argument provided, and it looks like Cygwin took that as the dreaded "rm -rf /".
I'm not sure what the damage is and I'm trying to assess it. As it was running before I stopped it, I saw a lot of "permission denied" messages.
The most visible damage was that my C:\cygwin64 folder was clobbered. All that was left in it was a few empty directories. I believe that there may have been some directories that were alphabetically above cygwin64 that were deleted because I don't remember it being the highest directory in the list, which it now is.
My computer is acting 100% normal and I haven't experienced anything strange yet. I just want to know if anyone has any experience with "rm -rf /" on Cygwin and whether this could clobber your entire drive like it would on Linux.
Part of the puzzle is that the root of Cygwin is beneath the c-drive, but it contains a reference to the c-drive in "cygdrive". I'm wondering if "rm -rf /" would actually go all the way through with deleting all of the contents of "/cygdrive" or if that is protected somehow.
EDIT: On a side note, does anyone know why "rm -rf " would be the same as "rm -rf /". I distinctly remember not supplying a path and leaving that parameter blank, so I don't know why it called rm on the root directory.
rm -rf
crosses mount points?--one-file-system
" Cygwin appears to support the same option.